Getting closer...the basement studio

As I tend to do from time to time, I've totally switched gears with the aesthetic for the basement studio from my last update. While I totally love and appreciate the all white, Scandinavian look...it's just not MY look. I was just afraid of the whole space looking far too cold and "basement." Yes, I probably could warm up the space with white floors with enough textiles and wood, but this has sort of cost quite a bit more than I already loosely planned to spend. I also could have epoxied the floor and redone it with a laminate if I decided I hated it, but again, that's both more money and more time, another thing of which I've spent more than I hoped!

So. I changed my mind.

We decided to go the safe route, and put in a wood-look laminate (I can't find a link, but I picked it up on a sale at HOBO for about $1.50/square foot). I debated back and forth in the store for quite a while between the wood we chose, which has the same tone as the rest of our house, and something more like a wide, rustic plank, and a couple of white washed options. In the end I decided it made most sense to match the rest of the house. Installation was pretty easy. In fact, the hardest part was just getting all the drywall mud and dust and general construction yuck off the floor! Our floors are not at all level, so we filled in the obvious holes as best we could. I do have some concerns about the adhesive - these were peel and stick, rather than a product with a separate adhesive. We walked all over it many times, and used a roller as well, but I can still feel a few spots that aren't perfectly adhered. I think we will wait and see if anything pops up, and maybe consider a separate adhesive to re-stick some of the looser pieces.

So with the flooring and trim largely done, I got a very large dose of impatience, and apparently some sort of super strength delusions, because I decided that it was perfectly feasible to move these into the room all by myself.

 

If you know me in life, you know that I'm not what you might call muscular. And if you know these couches in life, you know that the bigger one has a couple of recliners built in, which makes it about a billion pounds.

It was a bit of an experience, but I managed the little one without too much trouble. The bigger one? Well, I don't have any pictures because if I'd stopped to document the process it's possible I may have been crushed and killed. There was a lot of sweating, relatively little cursing, and I only got pinned into weird places about twice. But I did it!

With the couches in place, I could start bringing in some of the other furniture. I placed the rug that was in the current sewing room (which still has some residual oxy-clean spots from a red wine incident which was too aggressively treated and not at all well enough rinsed. I'm working on it.) as well as the filing cabinet, sewing table (the long one) and computer desk.

Yeah, that's not going to work. The current setup is the same, but without the computer desk, and fits just fine on the rug. When I drew up the plans, I was lazy and didn't bother to actually measure anything and just guessed at the dimensions. And apparently I guessed wrong.

Nope. Weird dead corner, and completely non-functional file cabinet.

Hey, ok! Not terrible, this could work! (I don't actually love, or even like the file cabinet, but we do need somewhere to file household things, so it stays somewhere in the works. In fact it's moved again since this was taken, but the work surfaces are still there.)

Oh....just look at all of that space to lay things out, free of computer and associated cables!

And the soon to be (I hope) someday best part....planning for the cutting table!!!

(I'm testing out sharing my posts with a few link parties. I've linked up to Kathe with an E, Pam's Party and Practical Tips and Vintage Paint and More.)

things to fill with other things

While I wish I was the kind of person who does, I almost never go to antique or thrift stores. Mostly, I don't have the time or patience to hunt through...but finally, I've had success! I've been wanting to find some little things to go in the studio, and I scored!

I opted against the corks...I have enough of those already.

For the past....oh, year or so, I've co-opted one of our laundry baskets to hold all of the burlap sacks I've collected for projects and have yet to deal with. I found a large wicker basket with a wood bottom that worked out just perfectly! And hey, I can stop sorting one of our loads of laundry on the dirty floor!

While backyard chickens is a dream I toy with from time to time...I decided to use the vintage egg basket for, well, yarn. Currently it's holding the stash I picked up at stitches midwest this year that I just wanted to get out of my reusable bag, as you can probably tell by the artful arrangement. The basement studio, while far from actually being "finished," is actually getting crazy close to ready to move in the big furniture, and I think these two baskets will be a great start to the "effortlessly put together and collected over time" look I'd love to achieve. Until then, these cute baskets will be unceremoniously shoved into the closet, which I call crazy overstuffed and my sister called organized. Ha!

Basement studio update, and a long winded decor discussion

Suddenly it's been a while since my last basement remodel update! It's been a little over two months since then, and while sadly, we aren't finished yet, we have made progress. And I've finally chosen a paint color....which I'm happy with and already second guessing.

So, as a refresher, this is the plan:

 This was the room at the end of June:

And this is the room today (by the way, the colors all look ridiculous because the room is currently lit by a single bare bulb, and these were taken at night, because, you know, life):

Looking toward the den area

 

Looking back at the sewing studio area

The only actual feature in the room right now - the removable bench/water meter casing (bench pulled out in the foreground for easier mudding) and future shelving area. You can also see a peek of the windows and how they are framing up so far. My husband has been taking on most of the work lately, and I think the plan is to frame those out with wood.

If you can't tell, the difference is walls. :)

Ok, the difference is actually electrical, heating ducts, sheetrock and 3 layers of taping and mudding of the joints. So I suppose that's an amount of work that makes sense to have taken 2 months outside of work and other such life.

As far as my decor plan.....man, this has been really hard! I don't want to sink a ton of money into finishes, so we're doing a lot of re-use of things we already have. While we've not had any water issues in the basement to date, I also hadn't planned on putting a lot of money into the finishes. My idea is to epoxy the floors (though a wood look vinyl has been suggested and is VERY tempting....), and I've chosen white from the standard Drylok colors.

 (Here you can see two samples that my sister brought over last night which are out of my price range, but again, very tempting! These run about $5/square foot, so she's going to look into some that run more like $1-2/square foot.)

I've discussed this before, but my rationale is that the gray floor tones would look SUPER basement/prison-ey, and I just don't like the tan, which leaves white! I also plan to paint the ceiling and parts of 2 walls white (Decorator White, rumored to be the perfect white) so I can have a nice, clean photography backdrop. Obviously, all of this WHITE plus the idea that I'd like to keep the wall color light because this is a basement after all and I don't want it to look like a cave, well, it all makes me nervous that the space is going to look super cold.

From my Pinterest board, this is the inspiration I've tagged on white floors that look really nice:

This is one of few I found that's a finish similar to what I am hoping to achieve, and while I like it, honestly it could use a rug or two.

While the fire certainly helps to warm up the room (har har) the major factors are probably the wood table and chair legs, wood columns and exposed brick. Now here's a weird thing....we actually have a chimney in our basement that has a very similar finish...that we drywalled over. Why? Well, we didn't want to have to bother with exposed steel beams and pipe columns in the room, and the chimney is on the OTHER side of the beam. So to expose it, we would have had to jog the wall just to expose the brick. Because we don't currently plan to add a fireplace (but how AWESOME would that be??!), it seemed like we'd be trying too hard just to expose the brick.

Again, great exposed brick, cool planked wall feature (and an odd little fridge nook)

Oh vintage rugs. If only, if only.

Great light and wood furniture go a long way.

Again, the use of natural wood is key, though the soaring ceilings certainly help.

Love the cushy rug, love the layering.

A common theme I've noted from my inspiration images is that the majority of white floors I love are painted wood. So in addition to the vinyl wood samples my sister is getting, I've asked her to look into a whitewashed vinyl wood look as well. (By the way, my sister is an interior designer, so sadly not everyone has a sister like that at their disposal!) I'm definitely on the fence about this flooring situation, but I figure that if I decide to go vinyl (which can be glued down to below grade floors unlike a lot of laminates) I can always use the white epoxy (which I already purchased, argh) in our garage which is always crazy wet and could use a moisture barrier.

Anyway, as for the rest of the room. I so wish I'd gotten a decent picture of my couches (one couch and one sofa), even though my sister says they are basically a neutral, it would have still helped me for color selection. I really thought I could find a similar couch online because they sort of scream standard 90's to me, but I couldn't! So....well they look like this right now:

Great visual, right?

Luckily they really ARE sort of neutral, unlike my mom's other 90's couch, which was a green and red and white plaid that we aren't going to talk about. She has really good taste otherwise, so we'll just blame that on the selection that was prevalent at the time! However, as inspiring as that jenga couch configuration above is, as it crowds out my laundry space, perhaps this is a little more helpful for a mood board sort of discussion:

It's got a little bit of everything, gray, white, blue, and peach....I don't plan to highlight the peach. :)

So this is the paint color we chose. It's Silver Strand by Sherwin Williams, and while its description as a "cool neutral" makes me a little nervous, it didn't look that cold in the space. While I AM Scandanavian, I haven't quite developed that all white aesthetic that they do so well, so I'm hoping this "almost color" on 2/3 of the walls will work.

I want to find some kind of great rug to ground the seating area. I'm sort of thinking something in a blueish tone, and I love the idea of a traditional looking rug.

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Then there's the overdyed rugs that I've considered for YEARS....

Option 4

Option 5

Decisions, decisions.

So additionally in the space, I'll have my sewing table, which is the Melltorp from Ikea, and a refinished desk chair from a few years ago (it's holding up well Sara!)

Both of these will sit on this rug

The other pretty large thing is the sewing area will be the yet to be built cutting table, which I'll build from Ana White's tutorial.

I can't decide if I want to do the base in white or navy, but I'm pretty sure I'll do the top in a stained wood.  I'm going to put it on casters so that I can shove it around as needed, and my sister made a great suggestion to put a groove in one side for cutting straight lines in fabric! I wonder if I can get ahold of one some kind of metal to put in there like you see at craft store cutting counters? I'll have to do some research on that. Then the shelves will be the same wood tone as the cutting top.

I've done very little planning for what will actually go on the walls themselves, and I could ponder it here...but this has gone on long enough and surely I've lost most of you by now! Hopefully by my next update I'll have painted walls, a finished floor, and I can move in the basics! I doubt the room will be "pin-worthy" for quite some time, but it will be exciting just to spread out if nothing else.

Simple sewing room organization

I think I got my sewing machine almost 15 years ago. It came with a little sampler pack of thread that was probably intended for little hand sewing jobs, and from there I've purchased and lost a ton of separate spools of thread. The spools I managed to hold on to, along with their corresponding bobbins, were neatly stored in an equally organized dresser drawer in this box.

It was obviously super effective, and spoiler alert, I'm all done doing it that way. If you are jealous and want to implement this method, I will totally send you this bottom half of a box of checks, just as soon as I find homes for these things which definitely needed to be stored with thread.

So now my thread storage (purchased at Joann's during their storage sale) looks like this:

 

When I get into the new space, I'll hang it on the wall, preferably near the sewing machine. The location actually isn't critical as it's not like my work space will be enormous. I don't find I do a ton of color changing mid project. In fact, it might end up making more sense near my fabric. Anyway, it's awesome that my sampler threads are no longer tangled with my bobbins, and I won't fill bobbins with the same color thread I already have (I'm looking at you, whites and tans), and I'll actually be able to see what I'm out of and what I need more of. This was honestly such a relief!

Hi there starter threads. We've come a long way.

 

Basement update

So last time I left you with a basement update, we were framing out the walls.

Since then, we've been making slow progress. We typically only get about one weekend day every two weeks to work on this, so that pretty much explains the lack of speed of renovation. While we've had several work days, many of them were filled with boring but necessary things like electrical and ductwork. All I'll say about that is that the drill bit on the left is the worst and the one on the right is the best.

I had to put my full weight on the first one to get anywhere, and the other just went through like butter.

So here is the current state of things - pink!

We've started putting up the insulation, and the drywall is on deck. Hopefully one more day or so of work and we can start laying up wall board, and the end will be near! Or at least...you might be able to picture an actual room?

We've made progress on that funny corner too. In the image above, we used to have a duct transfer on the right hand side of the room near the doorway. We would have had to drop a soffit down there to enclose it, but that was going to be a bummer because the ceiling height in this room is just over 7', and we didn't really want to drop the height right at the door. My husband was able to pull the transfer across the room to the left and hide it in the one soffit we already had to make. Remember my little sketch?

And here we are so far!

The soffit encloses the duct work and a gas line that came down below the joists, and you can see the framing for the removable bench that houses the water meter.

Slowly but surely...maybe by the end of summer?